Software Asset
Management.
Only a global approach is effective.
EasyVista 5 best practices.
EXECUTIVE
Not only is software a formidable productivity lever, it has also become one of the main items of IT expenditure and a source of legal, financial and technical risk. Software management is therefore a major challenge for any organisation. Managing software is a task that can prove difficult. There are numerous difficulties: the diversity of licenses among publishers and for the same publisher over time, draft licenses that are difficult to understand or licenses that vary (installation, concurrent access, server power, tokens, ASP, etc.), the ease with which the software is installed (download), difficulty of maintaining a historical record in the context of organisational evolution (mergers, acquisitions, restructuring, etc).
Long dealt with technically, locally and tactically, the implementation of an effective Software Asset Management (SAM) policy calls above all for a global approach in terms of organisation, methods and tools of control. As specialists in IT management for more than 20 years, EasyVista helps its clients to implement tools and methods for managing their software assets. The aim of this document is to present EasyVista SAM vision while the ISO 19770 standard (updated in 2012 and devoted to SAM) has become widely implemented.
Software Asset Management
Only a global approach is effective.
EasyVista 5 best practices.
Not only is software a formidable productivity lever, it has also become one of the main items of IT
expenditure and a source of legal, financial and technical risk. Software management is therefore a major
challenge for any organisation. Managing software is a task that can prove difficult. There are numerous
difficulties: the diversity of licenses among publishers and for the same publisher over time, draft licenses
that are difficult to understand or licenses that vary (installation, concurrent access, server power, tokens,
ASP, etc.), the ease with which the software is installed (download), difficulty of maintaining a historical
record in the context of organisational evolution (mergers, acquisitions, restructuring, etc).
Long dealt with technically, locally and tactically, the implementation of an effective Software Asset
Management (SAM) policy calls above all for a global approach in terms of organisation, methods and tools
of control. As specialists in IT management for more than 20 years, EasyVista helps its clients to implement
tools and methods for managing their software assets.
The aim of this document is to present EasyVista SAM vision while the ISO 19770 standard (updated in
2012 and devoted to SAM) has become widely implemented.
Airlines Have Evolved. Has IT?
Airlines and airports (the IT) have matured. The infrastructure that supports and manages the airlines and airports has evolved. Most major hubs now have high speed transits, advanced check-in, security has transformed since 9/11. The list goes on. The support and service system that supports this new hyper connected world of flight is now integrated and highly automated. OK things do go wrong. Bags get lost, items get broken, planes technically go wrong, but the system has a process and a policy for dealing with this.
The issue the airlines and airports have faced over the last 25 years is very similar to the one IT and more specifically IT Operations Management is facing. When airlines only flew to 10 or 15 servers, applications or databases, and only had a market of 100,000 customers (staff), things were very easy. If something went wrong we could call a meeting and build an emergency action plan. It was all a bit chaotic but we made it work.
My point is where IT comes from and where (and who and what format) it is delivered to is radically changing? Now, just like the airline and airport service industry, you don’t lose all you busses, trucks, refuelling platforms and lounges in one go. You build a transition plan so you can leverage the legacy while implementing an agile, integrated support and service platform that can deal with the passenger volume and demands, the destination hubs, and the growing network of routes.
Our current flight control system
We know a lot and we have rules. We have also invested in the radars, DME (distance measuring equipment), ILS (instrument landing system) to deal with our discovery, licence management, CMDB and change management.
We have an arrivals and departures ‘dashboard’ as well as a range of flight time-table reports on line, and we have connected the plethora of services, from booking, through check-in, to landing with scripts, Ethernet umbilical cords and coding to ensure the business process all works and the information is secure, collaborative and connects all of our customers, partners and staff. At the heart, the belief’s, moral values and culture are good, but the systems of record, control, support and management are imploding because something is happening.
The world of IT has changed
It’s almost happened overnight. Just like when you wake up one day and the airline has decided to open 100 new routes. It’s the same with the way IT is delivered to the business. The airline and its destination map is not in the IT basement any more, they have gone to the cloud, 1st line support has been outsourced to India and the ‘passengers’ now constantly walking with their heads crooked holding some new mobile device. With the constant ‘ping’ ‘ping’ ‘ping’ of personal email, business email, social notifications, breach notifications - personal email inbox is too large, ping, ping - next meeting request, employee bulletin – new starter notification, LinkedIn and Facebook. Facebook post - Ouch! … I have just walked into a wall!
The New IT
‘New IT’ has to consider the raw services, whether they be physical, outsourced, cloud, mobile, processing power and the like, they are no longer in the basement they are everywhere.
Some of the systems and services are yours, some are theirs. Information in the public domain is exploding. The internet of everything is upon us, and all of this has to be harnessed, squeezed through the IT ‘Security Gate’ to your staff and delivered in all flavours and colours including Blackberry, Apple & Chrome. This is all happening because great business gains can be realised. Improved functionality, lower costs, better services, mobility, better financial models, but IT has a lot more on its plate now. They are now dealing with a multitude of external suppliers, systems from the back office perspective and having to deal with a range of new delivery mechanisms to their customer the passenger, sorry staff and maybe partners, channels, and ultimate end customers. These new mechanisms are not just considering the format type (mobile, tablet, PC, browser, app) etc. They are also delivering services to take the pressure off self service. FAQ’s and knowledge bases, service catalogues and social collaboration tools. The passengers have also matured a little. They can help themselves.
We have gone from zero IP connections to about 3Bn in less than 15 years?
In the next 6 years we will be at around 200Bn IP connections
Yesterday, the apple grew on a tree, we used it to make an apple pie and put it on the trolley at 30,000ft for lunch. What was ‘cloud’ 5 years ago? We flew through them, not land on them! Billions are being spent on cloud services. Who ever dreamt of outsourcing their payroll, ERP, CRM, or 1st line tech support 10 years ago…now it’s standard business practice seen as ‘the norm’.
But the systems were not built for this!
Tomorrow, Bob will leave the company. The manufacturing team is relocating to Baltimore. We are changing one of our services to an AWS environment and email is going to be outsourced to a Microsoft cloud.
Now this sounds a bit dramatic, but the point is, there will be change. Irrespective of what the change is, chances are it is going to impact technology in some way. Now the technology will be fine. Technology actually rarely goes wrong. What goes wrong are people and processes.
How the enterprise deals with change from a workflow, contracts, approvals, support, education, security, reporting perspective is where the time is going to go in IT. In fact IT will become far more ICT, information (and Intelligence), Control and Technology. Where the’ I’ and ‘C’ are in upper case BIG! and the ‘t’ is in lower case, not so much the tech coding and integration, but
strategic ‘T’.
‘New ICT’ is going to require a new IT Operations Management fabric, traditional IT service and support management solutions have failed to deliver! A recent Gartner study highlights this. On their IT maturity model ranging from 1 to 5, the average of their survey sample was just a fraction over 2.
IT and customer demands have moved on!
20th century IT Management systems are just not designed to deal with the new customer needs, the new IT delivery models, and the ability to change service design quickly and simply. A 21st century approach is required.
Technology will remain a core foundation of IT, but more from a strategic perspective. Of more value will be Information and indeed Intelligence, but also control and management.
Here’s the 20th century problem that all
C-Level staff should be aware of.
IT kind of worked when it was 2 dimensional. We saw great gains in connectivity, collaboration and data processing and user support was simple (relatively speaking), because the service came from one box, through one network to one type of device, the PC .
Service and Asset Management was installed to manage Configuration / Capacity / Change / Help Desk / Request Management types of services, but now this is now creaking at the seams, creating security issues, change management issues, BIG DATA issues, workflow approval issues, because it was not designed to support the ‘New IT’.
All IT management solutions have a core suite of services and capabilities. These have to be ‘harnessed’ and increasing integrated with 21st century third party applications to deliver a useable support and service application and integrated business workflow. But, 20th century IT management is extremely rigid and complex, with many vendors requiring specialist scripts, code or integration to make it all work. Just about all have supposedly solved this with a thin veneer of graphical workflow design tools, but peel back the skin and you will see the complexity and hard coding has not gone away
No wonder dealing with change, IT chargeback, full asset lifecycle, and acting as the central ‘broker of ITSM and Asset Management, and delivering business intelligence and analytics is such a challenge. ‘ New ITOM’ (IT Operations Management) needs to do the work, technically connecting core services, products, workspaces, project or modules, where ever they are, all together into a service or best practice. The ‘New ITOM’ has to take away the challenges of connecting to, passing data bi-directionally and implementing automated workflow of third party technologies, services or outsourcers.
In ‘old IT’ many vendors put the CMDB at the heart of the model CMDB’s are seriously complex. They are will be critical in ‘New IT’, but in ‘old IT’ they are just too difficult to live with. That’s why less than 10% of Gartner’s client base (and these are very clever people) have successfully implemented one!
About EasyVista:
Our offices
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EasyVista™ Inc., a leading provider of Cloud based IT Service, IT Asset and Organizational Service Management solutions. The company serves customers in every vertical sector and has a direct presence around the world with offices in the United States, Canada, France, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal. With Tier 1, multi-lingual support and Network Operation Centers worldwide, our award winning Cloud based approach and unique IT Service fabric, EasyVista Neo™ allows companies to transform IT Operations Management for 21st Century IT. Our mission is to empower organizations to streamline and simplify the management and control of in-house, out-sourced and Cloud based IT. We are the broker of IT Service
